Short message service (SMS) is a telecommunications service that enables mobile subscribers to easily send and receive text messages via wireless handsets. More recently, multimedia message service (MMS) has emerged as a medium for enabling mobile subscribers to send and receive multimedia information, such as text, graphics, audio, and video information. As convergence of wireless communication networks and Internet data networks has grown, the sending and receiving of SMS and MMS messages via Internet-connected computer terminals has also become commonplace.
SMS service provides a mechanism for transmitting “short” text messages to and from SMS capable terminals (e.g., wireless handsets, personal computers, etc.) via the signaling component of the wireless communication network. For example, in a global system for mobile communications (GSM) network, the mobile application part (MAP) protocol, in conjunction with the signaling system 7 (SS7) or Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) SIGTRAN protocols, is used to facilitate the delivery of SMS messages via a signaling network. With particular regard to the sending and receiving of SMS messages by a wireless handset, a wireless communication network provides the transport facilities necessary to communicate short messages between a store-and-forward short message service center (SMSC) and a wireless handset.
Those skilled in the art of telecommunications messaging services, such as SMS and MMS services, will appreciate that the SMS components of a wireless communication network will diligently attempt to deliver every SMS message that is received by the network. While such guaranteed delivery service is an attractive feature or attribute of SMS system operation, the delivery of each and every SMS message addressed to a particular subscriber may not always be desired. SMS subscribers often find themselves the target of unwanted SMS messages, often referred to as “spam” or “junk” messages. Not only are such SMS “spam” messages annoying to mobile subscribers, but from a network operations perspective, large volumes of SMS “spam” messaging traffic has the potential to inflict a significantly negative impact on overall network performance. One conventional solution to screening SMS messages is described in commonly-assigned, U.S. Pat. No. 6,819,932, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. This solution includes screening messages based on called and calling party numbers in the signaling messages that carry SMS content. While such a solution provides an effective method for screening messages to or from a particular party, spam SMS message generators may initially be unknown. Thus, it may not be possible to define an SMS screening rule based on an SMS sender because the sender is initially unknown. Also, clever creators of mass spam attacks often insert randomly generated sender identifiers, making it impossible to determine the senders to block.
Similar to SMS, MMS service provides a mechanism for transmitting multimedia messages (e.g., audio, video, graphics, text, etc.) to and from multimedia-capable terminals (e.g., wireless handsets, personal computers, PDAs, network application servers, etc.) via a wireless communication network. A variety of techniques and associated protocols have been created to provide MMS services including wireless application protocol (WAP), wireless transaction protocol (WTP), wireless session protocol (WSP), and hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). According to one MMS communication technique, a WAP-based MMS message is communicated via a wireless network from a sending subscriber to a WAP gateway function using a MMS encapsulation (MMSE) protocol. The WAP gateway function removes WAP information from the message and package the MMS content in an HTTP-based message. The HTTP-based MMS message is subsequently communicated via an IP network to a MMS relay/server function. The MMS relay/server function performs store-and-forward processing on the MMS message.
While the store-and-forward mechanisms associated with SMS and MMS are not identical, the same potential spam problem exists for MMS messages as for SMS messages, and MMS subscribers/network operators need effective, flexible screening techniques for dealing with this MMS spam problem.
As such, there exists a need for novel methods and systems for preventing the delivery of unwanted messages (e.g., SMS, MMS) to a mobile subscriber and also to eliminate such unwanted message traffic from an operator's network so that valuable network resources (e.g., communication link bandwidth, SMSC nodes, MMS relays/servers, HLR nodes, VLR nodes, etc.) are not burdened by spam message traffic.